


Indecency in Ankh-Morpork

by Zoya1416



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: F/M, Fanart Discovered, M/M, RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-12
Updated: 2014-03-12
Packaged: 2018-01-15 10:31:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1301653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lord Vetinari and Sir Samuel Vimes discover slash fanart about themselves</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indecency in Ankh-Morpork

**Author's Note:**

> Discworld is Terry Pratchett's

Havelock Vetinari counted the right number of seconds after Vimes left. One...two...three...Whack! He smiled a little, which would have been a lot to anyone who'd ever seen him. It was wonderful to know some things were certain. He could wind Sam Vimes up like a top, and send him out into Ankh-Morpork like a spinning guillotine.

Vimes would shout at the great and the good, and encourage the small and not too bad. Of course, Vetinari thought, there was no such thing as good people. There were always and only bad people, but some were on opposite sides.

Vimes had asked him how he got up in the morning if he really thought that. He did believe it. What he didn't say was that he also believed certain people were always on the right side. One of them was Sybil Ramkin.

She was his only friend, and he saw her frequently at dinners, parties, and charity balls. He made sure he talked equally to all the women. But he couldn't help feeling relieved when he had a chance to speak to her, and he smiled more in her company. 

That's what made this particular siege of handbills so nauseating. Drumknott had been hiding them from him until this one was mistakenly placed directly on his desk by an undersecretary. When Drumknott returned a moment later from the necessary, he reached to take it, but it was too late. Vetinari was staring with horror at a drawing which showed him and Vimes sitting cross-legged at either end of a ...bed? Naked and grinning at each other like fools. 

“Drumknott! Have there been any more of these?” Drumknott hesitated. Vetinari held out a hand menacingly. 

There were five more, each lewd in the extreme, his figure entwined with Vimes in nauseating detail. Worse, the nameless cartoonist actually had a sense of perspective and composition. He must have drawn from life before. 

Could it be possible, he thought wildly, that Leonard de Quirm had betrayed him? His heart was stabbed.

“No, I asked him the first thing,” said Drumknott. “He said he knew nothing about this and could he please see one. I refused him of course,” he added quickly.

“How in seven gods' hells could they imagine such a thing was even possible! What kind of mind thinks that two men who so dislike each other, and meet once a week for twenty minutes could, could!” He stopped. He hadn't shouted since the affair of the dragon, six years earlier. Sybil had married Vimes then.

Sometimes in the deep night he wished he could have been another kind of man. He had once run across rooftops, fought in a revolution, and felt his blood running fast. And felt other men's blood running fast, which was the whole point. Sybil was too young then, only sixteen, and he was nineteen. He was a penniless member of the aristocracy—she was the only child of the richest man in town. And if he'd run up to her house breathless, while change was in the air, she'd have opened the door to him, frowned and demanded--

“Handkerchief! Spit!” and rubbed his saliva around his face, removing smuts.  
She always thought of him as a little brother, even though he was older.

If this cartoonist had an pound of observation (not an ounce. He'd taken quite a bit of care no one had noticed when he smiled), he might have speculated about Sybil, not Sam.

The inner door to his office was pounded on, and then opened so quickly he had just time to throw two knives. But he was aiming at a man in chainmail and leather jerkin who knew enough to keep his helmet down. Sam Vimes skidded to a stop in front of him, choleric, thrusting out the same type of dirty papers.

“Did you see these?”

“Yes, I did,” he said striving for calmness. “They're as preposterous as they are vile. Why someone should think that two men who have a twenty-minute business meeting”—he was cut off.

“Men? What are you talking about?” Vimes roared. “It's Sybil. And you. And it looks like it's drawn from life. What do you have to say about it?” Vimes thundered. He jerked one in front of Vetinari's face for a quarter of an instant, realized his mistake, and yanked it back. Silently Vetinari handed one of his over. Vimes looked at him, and he saw the nausea in Vimes' face, matching his own.

“He'll hang for this!” They said in unison. 

But he, or even she, did not hang. The entire city was searched, but in a careful way. You couldn't march around to the Artist and Housepainters' Guild and demand "Who's been drawing naughty pictures of his Lordship, then?” Ideas might be stirred.

Vimes gave a blank scrap of the paper to Angua, but she couldn't smell anything. Harry King praised its strength and whiteness. William de Worde said that it was too dear to be used in newspapers. Cheery tested scraps of the paints, all she was allowed to see, and came up negative.

In the end, nothing came of it. There were no more. Vetinari destroyed all of his, except, for some reason, the one of him and Vimes laughing at each other. He gave Leonard an official painting of Sybil and told him what he wanted. He didn't have to add, “and your life is forfeit if you mention it.” Leonard was well aware of that. Besides, he'd already started drawing pictures of Drumknott; blonde, blue-eyed, and young. 

The Right Sort of people in Ankh-Morpork knew that Lord Vetinari preferred to read music to himself rather than to hear it produced by saliva-laden air, or the actual scraping of strings. They laughed, because they saw it as another measure of his bloodlessness. What they didn't know was that he had started reading tangos.

**Author's Note:**

> Lord Vetinari was shocked to the core at the image of himself making passionate love to Lady Sybil, but he did not ask Leonard to redraw that scene. All he wanted was one or two of her in a clinging dress, lying on a sofa and smiling. Well, alright, since Vimes would kill him anyway if he ever found it, maybe one shoulder of the dress slipping...very low.


End file.
